Wednesday 7 February 2007

Fake e-mails

This morning I received an e-mail from the computer department of a prominent Scottish organisation.

The heading was:

Non Delivery Report - Re: BBC E-mail: Rapist asylum seeker due damages
The e-mail went on to say:
An e-mail message that you sent has been blocked by MIMEsweeper.

The mail message noted above contained a word or expression that is currently barred from transmission and is contrary to the security policy at (name of organisation).

I shall be contacting the organisation this morning to let them know that I didn't send them (or the BBC) that e-mail or indeed any other.

Other Scottish bloggers have been targeted in this way before. Unfortunately, it's extremely simple to send out e-mails purporting to come from others. I wouldn't be in the least surprised to hear that I'm not the only victim of this latest outbreak of scamming.

1 comment:

David Farrer said...

Comments made on previous template:

Stuart Dickson
I used to get a lot of that when I was blogging, It was pretty clear that it came from that American bampot that was banned from both our blogs. Funnily enough, they soon dried up when I stopped blogging, although I still get the odd one.

15 February 2007, 18:02:31 GMT
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David B. Wildgoose
I'm suffering the same problem as well - it seems to be getting more widespread. And to add insult to injury, an examination of the e-mail headers show the spam is being sent from Windows machines - my home box runs Debian Linux and has *never* even been tainted once by Microsoft.

9 February 2007, 07:58:06 GMT
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Angry Steve
Spam from back scatter generated by anti-virus scanners and bounces from mailservers are not new.  
 
I'd suggest you're wasting your time mailing postmaster / hostmaster at these sites, since if they were interested, they would have had their systems set up properly in the first place. 
 
However, bounces are supposed to be returned to sender, that's just the way things are, and it's damned infuriating - I have turned off the catch all email addresses for all but one of my domains to try to stem the flow of crap into my inbox.

8 February 2007, 14:57:17 GMT
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Peter Risdon
An examination of the "Received" headers, which are often visible in these bounce messages, is sometimes illuminating.

8 February 2007, 10:10:42 GMT
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Bill (Scotland)
I often get emails purporting to emanate from an email address at one of my registered domains; however, as I open only emails from senders I am pretty sure are genuine, and send to 'central filing' the rest, I am rarely aware of this kind of thing, although I wouldn't be surprised if I have been the 'victim' of it as well. Occasionally I will send the purported sender of an email I have received (without opening it), using the address in my own address book, to ask whether the message is genuine - only if I get a positive reply do I open the original email received. My motto is - if in doubt, delete unopened.

7 February 2007, 17:59:12 GMT
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Andrew Duffin
So someone spoofed your email address. 
 
Doesn't that happen every day, to everyone?

7 February 2007, 12:56:38 GMT
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knirirr
Cleanthes, 
 
That is indeed what I assumed it is and I also assumed that David's problem was similar. I may well be wrong, though.

7 February 2007, 11:39:33 GMT
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Cleanthes
knirirr, 
 
That sounds like a boring form of DDoS, but it is at least not personal. 
 
David's problem here sounds like a much more deliberate personal attack on his credibility. 
 
Nasty...

7 February 2007, 10:59:27 GMT
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knirirr
Though not a Scottish blogger, I've had a spate of spammers using one of my domains as the return address on their rubbish recently. It is very annoying.

7 February 2007, 09:21:20 GMT